Retail chatter about Bitcoin and Ethereum has drained back to 2020 levels, The Block's data desk says

Social-media mentions of Bitcoin and Ethereum have fallen to their lowest in a year, according to an excerpt from The Block's Data & Insights newsletter published July 13 and written by researchers Ivan Wu and Bryan Samsoedin. Daily tweet volume for the keyword "Bitcoin" has dropped to roughly 130,000, and "Ethereum" to around 40,000 — attention levels the authors say haven't been seen since 2020.

The metric is exactly what it sounds like: a count of how often the two keywords appear on X/Twitter. The Block treats it as a "rough proxy for retail mindshare" — how much the general public is talking about the assets — and is explicit that it tracks chatter, not capital. It says nothing directly about how much money is flowing in or out.

The framing The Block hangs on the number is a divergence: retail attention has "round-tripped" to pre-institutional 2020 levels at the same time institutional involvement — tokenization, ETF infrastructure, TradFi press releases — has moved the other way. That institutional "boom" is asserted in the piece rather than quantified alongside the tweet data; no flows, AUM, or on-chain figures are given in the excerpt to size it.

Key facts

• "Bitcoin" tweet volume ≈ 130,000; "Ethereum" ≈ 40,000 — both 12-month lows (The Block Data & Insights, July 13, 2026).
• Comparable attention last seen in 2020 (The Block).
• Metric is a keyword tweet count, described by The Block as a proxy for retail mindshare, not fund flows (The Block).
• The Block notes that historically, low tweet volume has "coincided with periods of price stagnation or drawdowns" (The Block).

The real-world read

This is one chart from one data newsletter, not a corroborated event — there's no second source here, and the underlying series (methodology, whether it's raw or filtered, per-day or per-hour) isn't disclosed in the excerpt, so treat the exact 130,000/40,000 figures as The Block's internal reading rather than an independently verifiable count.

Note the tension the piece itself flags but soft-pedals: low tweet volume has historically lined up with flat or falling prices, yet the writeup leans toward the more upbeat interpretation that "price action and infrastructure development no longer require the same wave of public attention." That's a hopeful read, and the authors say as much ("There is hope that…") — it's a hypothesis, not a finding.

One disclosure worth carrying: The Block is majority-owned by Foresight Ventures, a crypto investor, with exchange Bitget as an anchor LP for that fund. The Block says it operates independently; readers can weigh that themselves.

Opinion, and whose

• That institutional adoption is "decoupling" from retail engagement, and that cycles may no longer need retail attention: The Block's Ivan Wu and Bryan Samsoedin, framed as hope, not fact.
• That low chatter historically tracks price weakness: also The Block, cited as a historical pattern, not a forecast.

Sources

• The Block — "Bitcoin and Ethereum tweet volume falls to 12-month lows despite institutional crypto boom," Ivan Wu and Bryan Samsoedin, July 13, 2026 (excerpt from the Data & Insights newsletter). Sole source for the figures and framing. Not sponsored, but note The Block's own disclosure that Foresight Ventures is its majority investor and Bitget an anchor LP for that fund.

This is journalism, not financial advice; nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything.